Russia, Ukraine sit for talks on territories in UAE
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Abu Dhabi to address the vital territorial issue with no signs of compromise, as Russian attacks plunged Ukraine into the deepest energy crisis of the four-year war.
Ukraine is under increasing US pressure to reach a peace deal in the war triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022; The Kremlin demands that Ukraine abandon the entire eastern industrial region of Donbas before stopping the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the territorial dispute will be the top priority of negotiations in the United Arab Emirates.
“The Donbas issue is important. How the three parties will see it today and tomorrow in Abu Dhabi will be discussed,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp chat, a day after his meeting with US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Zelenskiy’s aide said talks in the Gulf were expected to continue on Saturday morning.
The talks take place against a backdrop of intensifying Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, causing major cities like Kiev to cut off electricity and heating as temperatures remain well below freezing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over its 20 percent of Donbas’ Donetsk region (about 5,000 square kilometers) has proven to be a major obstacle to a groundbreaking deal.
Zelenskiy refuses to give up the lands that Russia could not capture in four years of crushing and exhausting wars.
Polls show there is little appetite for land concessions among Ukrainians.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia’s insistence that Ukraine hand over Donbas was a “very important condition.”
A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Russia is considering the “Anchorage formula”, which would see Russia control all of Donbas and freeze existing front lines elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine, which officials say was agreed upon at a summit between Trump and Putin last August.
Donetsk is one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia says it will annex in 2022, following referendums that were rejected by Ukraine and its allies as fake.
Most countries recognize Donetsk as part of Ukraine.
As Friday’s talks continued, the head of Ukraine’s leading private energy producer, Maxim Timchenko, told Reuters that Ukraine needed a ceasefire to stop attacks on energy and that the situation was approaching a “humanitarian disaster.”
Ukraine’s power grid is experiencing its toughest day since the widespread power outage in November 2022, when Russia first began bombing the energy infrastructure, Ukraine’s Energy Minister said on Thursday.
Zelenskiy said in Davos on Thursday that the UAE talks would be the first trilateral meetings involving Ukrainian and Russian envoys and US mediators since the start of the war.
Last year, the Russian and Ukrainian delegations held their first face-to-face meeting since 2022, when they met in Istanbul.
A senior Ukrainian military intelligence official also held meetings with US and Russian delegations in Abu Dhabi in November.
Ukraine demands robust security guarantees from its allies in the event of a peace deal to prevent Russia from re-invading.
Zelenskiy also told reporters that an agreement on US security guarantees for Ukraine was ready and that he was only waiting for a specific date and place from Trump to sign it.
Russia, on the other hand, has floated the idea of using most of the Russian assets of approximately $5 billion ($7.3 billion) frozen in the United States to liberate Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.
Ukraine, backed by European allies, demands Russia pay reparations.
When asked about Russia’s idea, Zelenskiy called it “nonsense.”
Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution but will continue to work to achieve its goals through military means as long as a negotiated solution is difficult to achieve.
